This is what the Republicans really mean when they say “they want their country back”. They feel themselves an isolated minority, threatened by foreigners, ethnics, city slickers and “intellectual elites”. Even the traditional avenue to financial sucess, the small, entrepreneurial business, is becoming less and less viable. Escape from the working class is now primarily through the managerial/professional class, accessible only through an education that is now increasingly expensive and rationed.

No, I don’t mean to imply that Republicans are necessarily racists, although many racists are now finding a refuge in that party and it is welcoming them because it desperately needs allies. They just feel the world they watched on TV and in the movies when they were growing up, the world of Ozzie and Harriet, Beaver Cleaver, and the Ponderosa Ranch, no longer exists. They miss that world because it is the only world they know, the only world they feel comfortable in. The world they were promised is disappearing. Oh sure, most of America still sees itself as an American Grafitti Mayberry, but most Americans live in the suburbs or in Queens or the Bronx, or someplace like it, and they don’t listen to country music. Even Sesame street is populated by strange accents any more.

What is really fascinating is that so many Americans have been brought up in a milieu that fails to even recognize that alternatives to the mainstream culture even exist, much less are growing and expanding right alongside them. They seem incapable of even recognizing any other culture but their own, they are convinced everyone should be little copies of themselves and are astonished that they are not. They are beginning to feel like exiles in their own country. The economic decline of the middle class further forces them to confront the new social landscape. They can no longer just move out into the suburbs en masse to escape urban reality like they did a half-century ago. Now they have to deal with it and they don’t like it one bit.